This invention relates to tandem, or inline, roller skates and particularly those which are suitable for playing hockey. Hockey has long been a popular game on ice and, of course, hockey players are most familiar with ice skates and with the particular type of ice skates used in playing hockey. Such hockey ice skates provide a great deal of maneuverability permitting the skater to change directions and to stop quickly. This is in contrast with the usual recreational ice skating as well as the usual recreational inline roller skating.
The majority of inline roller skates on the market over the past twenty years have been developed primarily for leisure skating outdoors over large cracks in pavement. The wheels were designed large enough to roll easily over most of the cracks in the pavement but not so large as to raise the skater too far above the ground. Two steel ball bearings were used in each wheel to support the loads. The frames holding the wheels to the boots were designed with supports on both sides of the wheels to increase the strength of the skate. For the most part, the hockey inline roller skates of the prior art have been designed substantially like recreational inline roller skates, although some designs have been lighter than others.
The typical construction results in skates which are extremely heavy and difficult to maneuver when playing inline hockey, figure skating or stunt skating. Subsequent attempts to lighten the skates have made the resulting skates too slow, because of increased friction or, subject to failure because they were not sufficiently robust. Even so, inline roller skates have been used for playing hockey for over twenty years; see, for instance, U.S. Pat. No. 3,880,441 for a tandem roller hockey skate.
One of the principal differences between playing hockey with inline roller skates as opposed to ice skates, is the manner in stopping. In ice skating, the skater ordinarily comes to a quick stop by shifting the blade of his skates to a direction perpendicular to the direction of movement and then leans back, thereby providing sufficiently high friction scrapping along the ice so as to come to a complete stop. With inline roller skates, the usual manner of stopping in the past has been to use a brake snubber on the heel or toe of the boot to provide friction while the skate is still directed in the line of movement.
Many users of inline hockey skates attempt to stop in the ice skating manner using normal roller blade wheels. However, that is a difficult maneuver to master. The application of braking action in the ice skating manner is hard on inline roller skates since the force of braking is applied directly to the wheels, bearings and axles. In most instances, inline skate axles are supported by brackets on each side of the wheel and the braking force is thereby applied evenly to the two ends of the axles and the loads are distributed over the two ball bearings in each wheel. This configuration, however, is heavy and clearly limits the degree of "lean over" the skater can employ without having the bracket itself contacting the skating surface. To avoid the latter problem, some inline roller skates employ a cantilevered axle secured to a downward extending bracket on only one side of the wheel. In such instances, the force of braking in the ice skating manner provides a lever arm tending to bend the axle upwardly from the bracket and produce a substantially magnified force against the axle. In such instances, the axle, as well as the wheel structure itself, must be sufficiently strong to withstand any such forces. To date, skates using such cantilevered axles have been too heavy to provide the desired maneuverability. Much of that weight has been in the wheel structure itself which ordinarily includes a pair of ball bearings for each wheel so as to provide the necessary strength to resist the braking forces.